Beautiful Torment *Book One of the Beautiful series*

37) Back to Camp

She blushed, recalling the feeling of him inside her and found the thought stirring her need. Making her ache for him. Was it normal for her to already feel so wanting? The whores at Granston House would have her believe the act was a woman's duty as opposed to pleasure. But she had found it to be the most exhilarating experience of her life thus far.

Pulling his cloak up to cover her bare breasts, she whispered his name, voice cracking from hours of disuse. At the sound, Alexander turned to her, the dark look in his eye slowly fading to one of warmth as he appraised her naked form.

Slowly, he rose to his feet and ambled towards what pretty much amounted to a human sized nest–a trampled circle in the tall, soft shore grass that he must have moved her to in her sleep.

He took her fingers, kneeling down, and kissed them lightly, each small point of contact was a jolt of pleasure. She longed to be near him completely, and unabashedly crawled into him so he was forced to sit and take her into his lap. Lucy buried her face in his neck, breathing in his sharp familiar scent. In contrast to the usual whiff of fresh rain, he smelled like a brewing thunderstorm with heat that unequivocally danced off of him as strikes of lightning. Lucy pulled back to peer into the obsidian depths, noting how his flames lay dormant, replaced, momentarily by a bone chilling emptiness.

The thoughts of their initial conversation came rushing through her head. "Your father...Endon...the queen? '' Lucy whispered, and though she held no love for the king who had once put her life so carelessly in harm's way, she still felt like crying. "What happened?"

Turning with her back to his chest and her head angled to look at him, Lucy lifted her arm so she could run her fingers along his hair at the opposite side. Alexander's fingers caught the underside of her elbow and pulled in near to run his lips over the birthmark on her arm. She trembled at the intense wave of pleasure it sent through her, erecting her already peaked nipples which he brushed over with his free hand.

"It was all a ploy." He mumbled into her skin, the words vibrating along the length of her forearm. "The queen knew exactly what she was doing when she confronted you in the courtyard."

Lucy released a startled breath, her eyes jerking to meet his. The alarm must have given away her thoughts, because the prince answered before she could ask. "Yes, I know what was said. Like the queen, I also have eyes and ears apart from my own...though I wonder...if they had reached me sooner...we might have been spared all this." A spark of fire, like flint striking stone, flared in the black. He lowered Lucy's arm, bringing his fingers down to weave within hers. "Dearest Queen Mary has convinced the court that my father perished at the hand of you and your mother. And that after the deed was completed, you fled into the night." He growled in a deadly voice that shook Lucy to her core. A million thoughts and questions erupted in her head, but she did not dare interrupt his explanation. "Because I would not condemn you and call for your head in the days that followed, I was branded a co-conspirator. A traitor to the crown and my blood. When I went to confront my stepmother, I found the vile god in her chambers, and it all made sense. He is here, Luce. In the flesh. And he helped her kill my father." Lucy was startled by the intense sorrowing rage that played over his face, like he could not decide whether to weep for the dead king or roar in fury.

"My step mother had not the strength to do my father in alone. When she saw me, she introduced me to the god of chaos. And Lucy...it was gut wrenching, as though I had just met death incarnate. He is powerful. The years away have only made him stronger. Without you by my side to help control my fire daemon...I was no match for him." Alexander's fingers lifted the hem of his shirt to expose an almost fully healed gash that ran from one side of his hip to the dip beneath his rib cage, two inches wide, a shade of light pink against his pale, muscular torso.